SEO "Defined" in the Sunday Times

The Search Engine Optimization industry has long been ignored by the press, who often focus on more "established" forms of marketing. A few years ago, it was very difficult to find an article about SEO in any mainstream or even fringe media outlet. How things change. Recently, Danny Sullivan, among others, was covered in an article about SEO in USA Today (recap). Prior to that, there was an article about the demand for search marketing professionals in WSJ's Career Journal. And then there was the Sunday Times...

A thread at Search Engine Watch introduces the article from this weekend's Sunday Times, which as Rand points out is woefully full of errors. Some examples of non-factual statements made by the author:

There are two types of search engines — directories and web crawlers. Directories, such as Yahoo, have staff paid to consider every new website submitted before slotting them into categories or subsections.
Web crawlers such as Google or Ask.com work by sending out software programs — called bots — that trawl the web for information relevant to a user’s key word search.

OK I guess Yahoo! doesn't have a crawler?

Blogs are very “search-engine friendly” because they are rich in key words, and contain a large amount of text.

This warranted its own paragraph...

There are plenty more questionable statements in the article. It is a shame that the Times did not run this by an actual SEO expert for editing...I know there's at least a couple over there!